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In the good seats
In the good seats: Essays on film is an arresting new collection of essays featuring some of the most talented writers working today, setting their sights on what’s so alluring and moving about film and cinema. A childhood film encountered on the big screen, a favourite celluloid instant, a resonating discovery, an awkward first date; the threadbare seats, the click and whirr of the projector, the sense of scale expanding.
Each essayist in this extensive collection unearths those particularly breathless and unforgettable moments when their lives were touched by film. Like a projection of light beaming across a darkened hall, In the good seats, pulls us closer to those flickers of magic that film and cinema usher forth.
With contributions by Darran Anderson, Maggie Armstrong, Dodie Bellamy, Susannah Dickey, Maria Fusco, Francis Halsall, Daisy Lafarge, Michael Magee, Ian Maleney, Toye Oladinni, K Patrick, Devika Ponnambalam, Ali Smith, and Cathy Sweeney.
Pre-order your copy!
Publication date: March 2025
Publicity: peter@peteroconnellmedia.com
EXTS: 11 × 17.5 cm, 176 pp., 4 ills., softcover
ISBN: 978-1-9161509-6-6
Design: Daly & Lyon
RRP: €15 / £13
Trade Representative: Signature Books / E: sales@signaturebooksuk.com / P: 0845 862 1730 Orders: Central Books / E: orders@centralbooks.com / P: +44 0845 458 9916; Argosy Books / E: info@argosybooks.ie / P: +353 (0)1 8239500
€15.00Add to cart
You spin me round
You spin me round is an illuminating collection of essays, an essential mixtape that takes elements of music – songs, performances, albums, gigs – as points of departure. Some of the finest writers at work today reflect on what music has meant to them at different moments in their lives.
The writers sift through the material artefacts of their music worlds – torn ticket stubs, creased flyers, worsted wristbands – those items that slip out of a book or the back of a drawer, or that appear crumpled in the pocket of an old coat. You spin me round is a compilation of totems, a distillation of ineffable musical experiences.
€15.00Add to cart
Running feet, sharp noses
The speed of a cinema film is 25 frames per second. God knows how many frames per second flicker past our daily perception. But it is as if at the brief moments I’m talking about, suddenly and disconcertingly we see between two frames. We come upon a part of the visible which wasn’t destined for us. Perhaps it was destined for — nightbirds, reindeer, ferrets, eels, whales …
– John Berger, ‘Opening a Gate’
What is it about animals? – those creatures that keep us company, a figure in a memory or folktale, the shadowy presence in a photograph, or an ancient drawing on a wall. Guides, companions, imaginary beings, hindrances, sources of fear and love …
Edited by Nathan O’Donnell, Adrian Duncan, and Niamh Dunphy, Running feet, sharp noses: Essays on the animal world is an essential collection of essays on the animal world. Each piece is a profound meditation on how animals affect our sense of self, our memories, our actions.
This brilliant new book of non-fiction investigates – with the insights and perceptions of some of the finest writers at work today – how animals shape and determine our everyday lives, whether we realise it or not.
‘Spirited and intense, compact as poetry, Running feet, sharp noses reads like a classic.’
– Martina Evans, Irish Times
‘Running feet, sharp noses unveils a collection of chambers, with each writer’s cosmos featuring the animals in their lives; “a source of magic”.’
– Aisling Arundel, Totally Dublin
‘Sensitive, playful, and every bit as charming as its subjects, Running feet, sharp noses is a modern bestiary, a fitting tribute to the fragile and dear connections we forge with animals, and their ability to capture the literary imagination.’
– Roisin Kiberd, author of The Disconnect
‘A joy.’
– Irish Independent
‘Extraordinary … Animal lovers, or indeed lovers of great, philosophical writing, will adore this book which invites repeated readings and reflections.’
–Andrea Cleary, Business Post
‘A treasure … exquisite … A beautiful anthology.’
– Anne Cunningham, Westmeath Examiner
‘These unique non-fiction stories deserve to be on your reading list in 2023.’
– ‘Hot 100’, Irish Examiner
Listed in: ‘The best new fiction and non-fiction coming your way from January to June.’
– Anne Cunningham, Irish Independent
With contributions by Latifa Akay, Sara Baume, John Berger, June Caldwell, Niamh Campbell, Vona Groarke, Edward Hoagland, Sabrina Mandanici, Darragh McCausland, Tim MacGabhann, Honor Moore, Eileen Myles, Stephen Sexton, Jessica Traynor, Erica Van Horn, and Suzanne Walsh.
Publication date: March 2023
Publicity: peteroconnellmedia@gmail.com
EXTS: 11 × 17.5 cm, 176 pp, 1 b/w ill., softcover
ISBN: 978-1-9161509-4-2
Design: Daly & Lyon
€15.00Add to cart
well I just kind of like it
To inhabit a home means to leave traces; it is a place of self-expression, a place of one’s own. We collect and display what we choose: a print, a chipped figurine, a collection of spoons or plates, photographs, books, a rug, a painting whose origin is forgotten, an unmade bed …
well I just kind of like it, edited by Wendy Erskine, comprises a collection of writing and images about art in the home and the home as art. Through a beautifully arranged series of essays, conversations, photographs, fragments, drawings, and reflections, each contributor sheds light on the stuff of the home in a vital and compelling way.
‘A powerful look at a wide and idiosyncratic range of work … There’s a sense, throughout, of things that had been peripheral coming into focus.’
– Niamh Donnelly, Irish Times
‘Undoubtedly a vibrant tapestry of work. Erskine masterfully concocts a visual feast.’
– Aisling Arundel, Totally Dublin
‘This collection lends credence to our own personal tastes, and to our human impulse as curators and creators of art.’
– Andrea Cleary, Sunday Business Post
With contributions by Latifa Akay, Mauricio Alejo, Richard Billingham, Jo Broughton, Darran Anderson, Rossa Coyle, Emily Dickinson, Susannah Dickey, Wendy Erskine, Nicole Flattery, David Hayden, David Keenan, Heather Leigh, Philip Mann, Jan McCullough, Gareth McConnell, Lara Pawson, Keith Ridgway, Joseph Scott, Frances Stark, Annelies Štrba, Maurice van Tellingen, Joanna Walsh, and Shaun Whiteside.
Publication date: November 2022
Design: Daly & Lyon
13.5 × 21.6 cm, 112 pages, colour ills., softcover
ISBN 978-1-9161509-3-5
€15.00Add to cart
Being a Border
Border thinking has become a defining feature of the global social order in the twenty-first century. In Being a Border, art historian, critic, and theorist Nuit Banai writes on the technics of the border in contemporary art and culture.
Edited by Francis Halsall and Declan Long, Being a Border examines a wide span of artists’ practices and political concerns, exploring how border thinking has been cultivated and engineered as well as how it has been critiqued. Looking at a range of art practices – including Richard Mosse, the Centre for Political Beauty, Vedovamazzei, and Grada Kilomba – Banai considers how artists have found ways to subvert these increasingly pervasive biopolitical and necropolitical technologies and systems.
The first in a new book-series, Transmission Sites, Being a Border is a co-publication by Paper Visual Art and the National College of Art and Design, Dublin. This book was written following Nuit Banai’s participation in the Art in the Contemporary World (ACW) / IMMA Visiting Critic-in-Residence programme in 2014.
Transmission Sites is a cross-disciplinary book series, featuring extended critical texts on current concerns by key theorists or writers. Each book is devised and co-published with a partner educational or cultural institution.
Design: an Atelier Project
10.5 × 15 cm, 52 pages, 8 colour ills, softcover
ISBN 978-1-9161509-2-8
€15.00Add to cart
You & i are Earth
You & i are Earth brings together texts by a wide range of Irish and international writers, all of whom share painting as a starting point. These texts take several forms: artists’ writing, personal essays, analytical and critical accounts of paintings that range from Renaissance masterpieces to the work of contemporary avant-garde artists.
Taking its title from the enigmatic inscription on a seventeenth-century Dutch-made plate, discovered in a London sewer, You & i are Earth follows a set of poetic associative patterns that derive from Feehily’s artistic practice, exploring serendipitous connections and recovered histories, attending thoughtfully and with care to what might seem incidental. Like the inscription on the found object, paintings contain moments, feelings, obsessions – traces of life preserved in layers of pigment. In the artist’s words, ‘This is a daybook, a commonplace, an anthology of shared attention.’
Contributions by Annie May Demozay, Fergus Feehily, John Graham, Jack Hanley, Mary Heilmann, Naotaka Hiro, Rebecca O’Dwyer, Paul P., Eleanor Ray, Luis Sagasti, Carole Seborovski, Mark Swords, Stephen Truax, and Joost van den Bergh
Accepted into the 100 Archive (2020).
March 2021
Design: an Atelier Project
Kindly supported by the Arts Council
12 × 18.9 cm, 112 pages, 8 b/w and 14 colour ills., softcover
ISBN 978–1–9161509–1–1
€18.00Read more
Everything Is Somewhere Else
The things and processes we often categorise as ‘infrastructure’ occupy a zone beyond the limits of our cognition; and yet this zone is buried in our everyday lives. Infrastructures operate below the average thresholds of human awareness while subliminally dictating the permissible flows of the everyday. To engage creatively with them is to go back to first principles. To think critically about them is to think about the ways in which realities are sculpted, about politics and power.
Everything Is Somewhere Else, edited by Dennis McNulty, presents an innovative cross-section of the infrastructural turn in contemporary art and comprises a heterogeneous mix of texts, both fiction and non-fiction, documentary materials, and images. Each contribution reflects directly or indirectly on infrastructure, on the interwoven mesh of systems that inhabit our lives, affect our thoughts and beliefs, and play a key role in how we live and move in the contemporary world.
“… meticulously edited …”
– Ingrid Lyons, Visual Artist News Sheet, Jan/Feb 2021
Contributions by Maeve Connolly, Matthew De Abaitua, Chris Fite-Wassilak, Jessica Foley, Gabriel N. Gee, Cliona Harmey, Nancy Holt, Shannon Mattern, Eva Richardson McCrea, Dennis McNulty, Jennifer Reut, Matt Packer, Charlotte Prodger, Anne Tallentire, Dan Walwin
June 2020
Design: Peter Maybury
Kindly supported by the Arts Council
96 pages, 24 colour ills., softcover, fold-out
ISBN 978-1-916150-90-4
€15.00Add to cart
One Here Now: The Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland Project
In the Centre Gallery of Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh, County Cork, lay, until recently, behind layers of liner paper and white emulsion, a very well-kept secret: a nine-part series of floor-to-ceiling paintings by the New York–based Irish artist Brian O’Doherty, created under his pseudonym Patrick Ireland. The brightly coloured abstract wall paintings, titled One Here Now: The Ogham Cycle, were completed in 1996 using the system of codes and inherent structures of the ogham language, an early Irish alphabet. After their initial display, the paintings were covered over. For the next twenty-two years they went unseen.
In 2018 Sirius Arts Centre Director Miranda Driscoll organised an ambitious project to uncover and temporarily restore the paintings, with the expertise of the conservator Don Knox. To coincide with this restoration, she also commissioned a year-long programme of artworks, compositions, performances, and talks that would respond to O’Doherty/Ireland’s work. One Here Now: The Brian O’Doherty/Patrick Ireland Project, co-published by Sirius Arts Centre and Paper Visual Art, comprises essays on O’Doherty’s wall murals and on each of the exhibitions and events that took place at Sirius Arts Centre from 2018 to 2019. The contributions in this book re-examine and re-interrogate the wall paintings and reflect on a project intended to preserve the legacy of these important artworks for future generations.
Contributions by Alexander Alberro, Chris Clarke, Miranda Driscoll, Emma Dwyer, Luke Gibbons, Francis Halsall, Sarah Hayden, Kathleen James-Chakraborty, Sarah Kelleher, Prem Krishnamurthy, Eoghan MacIntyre, Ian Maleney, Brenda Moore-McCann, Peter Murray, Kirstie North, Brian O’Doherty, Nathan O’Donnell, Jenny Roche, and Mary-Ruth Walsh.
The book was launched at Sirius Arts Centre by Frances Morris, Director of Tate Modern, in April 2019.
April 2019
Design: Daly + Lyon
Kindly supported by the Arts Council
25 cm × 30 cm, 194 pages, 24 colour ills., softcover
€30.00Add to cart
Having a Kiki: Queer Desire and Public Space
Having a Kiki: Queer Desire and Public Space, edited by artist Emma Haugh, presents an unprecedented examination of public space and the built environment through queer, dyke, and transgender perspectives.
‘Given the interdisciplinary nature of Having a Kiki, its appeal will surely be as broad as encompassing as the experiences relayed within it.’
– Stephen Moloney, Totally Dublin, February 2017
Contributions by Oreet Ashery, Claude Cahun, Faye Green, Emma Haugh and Suza Husse, Frankie Hucklenbroich, Libida Club Archive, Sally R. Munt, Kaj Osteroth and Lydia Hamann, Sideroom (Amal Alhaag and Maria Guggenbichler), Neo Sinoxolo Musangi, and Eimear Walshe.
Awarded the ICAD Silver Bell award for design.
Accepted into the 100 Archive (2016).
October 2016
Design: Atelier Projects
Kindly supported by the Arts Council
17 cm × 24 cm, 96 pages, 24 colour ills., softcover, 2 inserts
ISBN 978-0-957335-06-6
*Low stock*
€50.00Add to cart
Nevsky Prospect
Nevsky Prospect, edited by Adrian Duncan and Niamh Dunphy, considers the ‘sci-fi turn’ in contemporary art practice through essays, fiction, and images.
Contributions by Nina Canell, Adrian Duncan, Hu Fang, Francis Halsall, Declan Long, Dennis McNulty, Brenna Murphy, Isabel Nolan, and David Upton
October 2015
Design: Peter Maybury
Kindly supported by the Arts Council
16 cm x 23 cm, 72 pages
ISBN 978-0-9573350-4-2
€7.50Add to cart
Issue 16
In choosing to focus this edition of Paper Visual Art Journal – PVA 16 – on Berlin, we are continuing a series of city-specific editions, following on from those that focused on Dublin, Cork, and Limerick.
We have done so partly because of our long-standing connection to the city. Our editorial staff is split between Dublin and Berlin, and we were interested in exploring the relationships between these places, decades after the emergence of Berlin as a destination for visual artists. We wanted to take a look at the current conditions of a city that was for many years seen to be affordable and supportive of visual-art practices. Over the last twelve months, this survey has become more politically focussed than anticipated. Aspects of German politics and policing have come to the fore in this time, contributing to a sense among artists that Berlin is not quite the utopia it was once considered to be.
The contributions collected here reflect on art, architecture, and culture in Berlin, unearthing aspects of its history, its connections to colonialism, its legacy as a divided city, and its relationship to its artists today.
With contributions from Laurence Counihan, Mark Curran, Adrian Duncan, Andy Fitz, Aingeala Flannery, Marcel Krueger, Sabrina Mandanici, Rebecca O’Dwyer, Doireann O’Malley, Sue Rainsford, Rory Rowan, and Daniel Seiffert.
November 2024,
Design: an Atelier project
Kindly supported by the Arts Council
ISSN: 2565-6376
€14.00Add to cart
Issue 15
Guest edited by Emma Dwyer
Ghosts, whether real or not, are haunting me. Since I committed to guest-editing this edition of PVA, they have been appearing everywhere. There are the ghosts that tap your shoulder when you’re washing the dishes, or whisper your name in your ear when you’re in a lift. There’s the ghosts that your granny talks about roaming houses and misplacing keys, opening cupboard doors in the night. Then there are the cultural spectres that haunt our ways of producing music, literature, visual art, and other art forms.
In Ireland we have a very particular experience of ghosts. In folklore, other worldly beings are experienced when the veil between our world and the otherworld is thinner; this, it is believed, happens near water and at Hallowe’en. Colonialism and masse migration in our history have meant that there are gaps in our collective memory of folklore. During the formation of the state, the Celtic revival, led by W. B. Yeats and Maud Gonne, reclaimed folklore and mythicism to attempt to re-identify Ireland. Automatic writing was practised by this group, allowing ghosts to channel messages through them.
Touching upon some of these ideas of ghosts, hauntology, and spectre, PVA 15 brings out the real and not-so-real ghosts in contemporary culture.
With contributions from Rosa Abbott, Blindboy Boatclub, Laurence Counihan, Emma Dwyer, John Graham, Sarah Kelleher, Roisin Kiberd, Eddie Lenihan, Rebecca O’Dwyer, Matt Packer, and Suzanne Walsh.
November 2023,
Design: an Atelier project
Kindly supported by the Arts Council
ISSN: 2565-6376
€12.00Add to cart
Issue 14
For this edition of PVA, we decided to focus on association football (soccer) – from essays on the aesthetics of football, to the systems of its governance, to how the game has been represented on-screen, to the sensations and politics of a kick-around in a park. We invited artist Louis Haugh and author June Caldwell to attend a League of Ireland game at Dalymount Park, Dublin, in February this year, where Bohemians FC hosted Dundalk FC in their first home game of the 2022 season. Louis and June were asked to consider this game of football as a public artwork.
With contributions from Rosa Abbott, June Caldwell, Simon Critchley, Adrian Duncan, Orit Gat, John Graham, Louis Haugh, Aleksandar Hemon, Juliet Jacques, Sarah Kelleher, Vincent Le, Marcela Mora y Araujo, Rebecca O’Dwyer, David Smith, and Claire Walsh.
September 2022
Launch: Friday, 23 September, 6.30 p.m., Dalymount Park, Dublin
Design: an Atelier project
Kindly supported by the Arts Council
ISSN: 2565-6376
€12.00Add to cart
Issue 13
For this edition of Paper Visual Art Journal, we have invited artists and writers whose work reflects on or emerges from the land – among our contributors, several are involved in farming or are making work in rural contexts. Their work reflects a growing set of concerns within contemporary art practice in Ireland, centred on farming and the stewardship of the land, as we grapple with the challenges facing a traditionally agricultural society in the twenty-first century. These are artists and writers who explore, in different ways, our relationships to the natural world and the profound ecological, social, and interpersonal questions that surround it.
With contributions by C. S Andrews, Rachel Andrews, Rachel Donnelly, Adrian Duncan, Laura Fitzgerald, Selina Guinness, Francis Halsall, Christine Mackey, Michele Horrigan, Sue Rainsford, Erica Van Horn, Michael Waldron, and Nidhi Zak/Aria Eipe.
December 2021
Design: an Atelier project
Kindly supported by the Arts Council
ISSN: 2565-6376
€10.00Add to cart
Issue 12
For this edition of Paper Visual Art Journal we decided to consider an aspect of life that has, over the last eighteen months or so, entered into the strangest sort of flux – touch. We invited a range of artists, writers, and a sportsperson to give a sense of what touch means in their field of study, work, life. We attempted to look at extremes of touch from the violent to the gentle, from broad to detailed, from human to robotic. What became apparent as this publication came together is that both the idea and the feeling of touch are difficult to elucidate – an adequate description always seems out of reach.
With contributions by David Beattie, Kevin Brazil, Niamh Campbell, Adrian Duncan, Máiréad Enright, Sophie Gorman, Colin Graham, Andy Lee, Rebecca O’Dwyer, Mairead O’hEocha, Alice Rekab, and Emmett Scanlon.
August 2021
Design: an Atelier project
Kindly supported by the Arts Council
ISSN: 2565-6376
€10.00Add to cart
Issue 11
For this edition of PVA, alongside three essay-length reviews, we have published a series of texts and images that gather around the theme of music in contemporary art. Here, the term ‘music’ is also extended into the directions of sound art, performance art, sculpture.
The publication of this edition also coincides with our tenth birthday!
With contributions by Karl Burke, Liam Cagney, Don Duncan, Emma Dwyer, Francis Hallsall, Sarah Hayden, Ian Maleney, Gabrielle Schwarz, Christopher Steenson, Jennifer Walshe, and Emma Wolf-Haugh
December 2019
Design: an Atelier project
Kindly supported by the Arts Council
ISSN: 2565-6376
€8.00Add to cart
Issue 10
Comprised of a selection of essays and reviews Paper Visual Art, vol. 10, focuses on the theme of borders and their connection to contemporary art and a shifting cultural landscape.
With contributions by Kevin Brazil, Garrett Carr, Laurence Counihan, Wendy Erskine, Peter Geoghegan, Declan Long, Rebecca O’Dwyer, Rachel O’Reilly, Kathy Prendergast, Andrey Shental, and Guy Woodward.
March 2019
Design: an Atelier project
Kindly supported by the Arts Council
ISSN: 2565-6376
€8.00Read more
Issue 9
Alongside reviews of exhibitions in Ireland and elsewhere, Paper Visual Art, vol. 9, comprises a series of texts and contributions focused on craft and its relationship to contemporary art.
Contributions by Niamh Campbell, Helen Carey, Adrian Duncan, Deirdre Feeney, Francis Halsall, Kevin Gaines, Mandi Keighran, Declan Long, Emer Lynch, Sabrina Mandanici, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Rebecca O’Dwyer, Niamh O’Malley, Sinead Phelan and Rosie Lynch, Killian Schurmann, David and Sally Shaw-Smith, Olga Tiernan, Claire Walsh, and W. B. Yeats.
Autumn 2018
Design: Atelier Projects
Kindly supported by the Arts Council
€8.00Add to cart
Issue 8
Paper Visual Art, vol. 8 includes a series of essays focused upon art and education, as well as reviews of contemporary art in Ireland and internationally.
Contributions by Rob Doyle, Colin Graham, Sara Greavu, Jennie Guy, Caomhin Mac Giolla Leith, Eoghan McIntyre, Maeve Mulrennan, Nathan O’Donnell, Morgan Quaintance, Joanna Walsh, Colin Ward.
Winter 2017
Design: Atelier Projects
Kindly Supported by the Arts Council
Winner of the ICAD bronze bell for design. After seven ‘individual and unique’ issues of PVA, volume 8 was the first of a new and consistent editorial identity that rolls across all future editions. The design refresh of the journal implemented new typographic standards, a larger format, and a new cover design. Predominantly produced in two colours the journal is printed using a special mix of fluo ink, customised to improve legibility in different lighting/reading conditions.
€8.00Add to cart
Issue 7
Paper Visual Art, vol. 7 includes essays and reviews on contemporary art in Ireland and internationally. PVA 10 was awarded the ICAD Silver Bell for design, along with Having a Kiki (ed. Emma Haugh), and was accepted into the 100 Archive 2016.
Contributions by Claire-Louise Bennett, Miranda Driscoll, Adrian Duncan, Sara Greavu, Michele Horrigan, Sarah Kelleher, Karen McGann, Anne Mullee, Kirstie North, Rebecca O’Dwyer, Deirdre O’Mahony, and Pádraig Spillane.
October 2016
Design: Atelier Projects
Kindly supported by the Arts Council
ISBN 978-0-957335-05-9
Awarded the ICAD Silver Bell award for design
Accepted into the 100 Archive 2016
€7.50Add to cart
Blueprint
Paper Visual Art Journal: Blueprint (vol. 6) includes several invited responses (visual and textual) by critics and artists in response to the idea of the future, as well as several reviews of contemporary exhibitions in Ireland and internationally.
Contributions by Nuit Banai, Colin Darke, John Graham, Ruth Hogan, Sarah Kelleher, Emer Lynch and Tracy Hanna, Rebecca O’Dwyer, Caoimhín Mac Giolla Léith, Jonathan Mayhew, Eoghan McIntyre, and Lee Welch.
October 2015
Design: Peter Maybury
Kindly supported by the Arts Council
ISBN 978-0-9573350-3-5
€7.50Add to cart
Issue 2
The second Dublin-based issue of PVA was launched at the Joinery in Stoneybatter in 2011, and made possible with the generous support from all of the contributors.
Contributions by Karl Burke, Louise Brady, Adrian Duncan, John Gayer, Francis Halsall, Barbara Knezevic, Stephen McGlynn, Davey Moor, Rebecca O’Dwyer, Seán O’Sullivan, and Suzanne van der Lingen.
November 2011
Design: Niamh Dunphy and Adrian Duncan
Three-Issue Subscription
Receive three new issues of Paper Visual Art from only €40 (postage included). Alongside reviews, each issue of PVA includes essays or articles on a particular theme. The most recent issue PVA 15 is guest edited by Emma Dwyer, the theme is Ghosts. The forthcoming PVA 16 will be launched 2024.
€40.00Read more